Araucaria or Monkey Puzzle tree (Araucaria araucana) is a South American conifer that occurs in Chile and Argentina. It’s the type species of the Araucaria genus, with members in Oceania and America, and in Antarctica in ancient times. Araucaria is also a sacred tree to the Pehuenche people of southern Chile, and a protected species by the Chilean State and by CITES. Araucaria has been threatened by logging and by overharvest of its fruit, the piñón, and as a result is listed as endangered by the IUCN.
In this research project, we want to characterize Araucaria’s microbial communities in all of its natural range and to determine their drivers, e.,g., geography, altitude, etc. To do this, we are using amplicon and shotgun sequencing, as well as RAD-Seq to infer Araucaria’s genealogical relationships, its population size, and number of genetically distinct populations.